Track 7 Delilah #2
It’s a heady thing to see, and Delilah finds herself unable to stop looking back.
Her fingertips are warm and tingling from the three glasses of wine she’s had in the time it’s taken Emmett to sip their way through half of one.
She’d be worried about the volume of her voice, aware that she always gets louder when she dives into tipsy storytelling, but she and Emmett are close enough together, she realizes, that she hasn’t had to raise her voice at all.
If anything, she’s speaking more softly than she has in months.
How long, she wonders, has she been raising her voice, just trying to be heard?
Delilah swallows, pushing the thought away before it can burrow in too deeply and set her spiraling. “And they lived happily ever after,” she finishes.
Emmett smiles, chin resting in one palm. “I liked that one.”
“Everyone’s a sucker for a gay Prince Charming,” Delilah agrees.
“Disney’s leaving money on the table, I’m telling you.
” She extends a foot into the slight space between their chairs to poke one of Emmett’s well-worn boots with the toe of a scuffed Converse.
“Okay, I’m all talked out. It’s your turn. ”
Emmett looks briefly alarmed. “I don’t know how to tell stories like that,” they say. “Not—not like those ones, where you make them different.”
Delilah shrugs. “So tell me a story you do know,” she says. They don’t look convinced, so she adds, “It doesn’t even have to have a happy ending.”
“That wasn’t really what I was worried about,” Emmett mutters, but they sit back, regarding their wine for a moment before sighing and draining the glass. Delilah offers them the bottle, but they shake their head, carefully setting the glass under their chair where no one will step on it.
“All right,” they say. “This is an old story. Jacob told me that it is also a true story, though there are different versions. This is the version I learned. The first story he ever told me.”
Delilah scoots her chair forward. “Once upon a time,” she prompts.
Their lips quirk, a small smile, and they incline their head toward her. “Once upon a time,” they agree. They pause for another moment, as if considering where to go next, and then begin again.
“Once upon a time, in the city of Prague, there was a great rabbi named Judah Loew ben Bezalel.”
“Strong start,” Delilah says. “Wild name, though.” Emmett cocks an eyebrow at her, and she raises her hands. “Sorry, sorry. Your story. Go ahead.”
The look Emmett gives her clearly says they don’t trust her not to keep up her commentary. Delilah mimes zipping her lips shut, and they finally shake their head and continue.
“Rabbi Loew was a great teacher, known throughout the city as a revered spiritual leader. People traveled for miles to learn his Torah, to study with him and hear his wisdom. But only his most trusted disciples knew that he was also a practitioner of ancient Jewish magic.”
“Plot twist,” Delilah mutters, and then, before Emmett can say anything, “Sorry! Sorry. I’m shutting up, I swear.”
“He had discovered the secret mysteries hidden within the texts he studied,” Emmett says, their expression caught somewhere between amusement and exasperation. “But he was a holy man, and knew they were only to be used for the protection of his community.
“One day he heard word of an impending pogrom against the Jews of the ghetto. Thinking of the very young and the very old, the scholars and widows, of everyone he knew who could never protect themselves, he decided the time had come to use what he had learned. He turned to the pages of the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, until he found what he wanted: the divine instructions for bringing life to an inanimate form.”
The timbre of their voice begins to change as they start to sink into the story, and Delilah listens in quiet fascination, watching the firelight play across their features.
She can almost feel the age of the story through their words—just hearing it is like falling through time, that particular magic of listening to something passed down through the generations, translated from one language to another and another and another.
Even Emmett’s voice seems to change the longer they speak, their soft tones alternately smoothing and deepening, the accent Delilah has heard only a few times over the course of the day curling more tightly around the occasional syllable.
“On a moonless night, the evening of Rosh Chodesh, Rabbi Loew stole away from the walls of the ghetto and made his way to the banks of the Vltava River.
There, under a blanket of darkness, he gathered enough clay to shape a figure—a golem.
Beardless, genderless, with plain, forgettable features.
A creature designed for the shadows, not the light.
“When it was finished, he took the yad from his synagogue’s beloved Torah scroll and carved three letters into the body he had made: Aleph, Mem, and Tav, spelling out Emet, the Hebrew word for truth.
Only then did he breathe life into the golem’s lungs.
Clay turned to skin, and eyes that had never existed before opened to the world, clear and silver as the moon missing from the sky.
Rabbi Loew clothed it in simple garments and covered its hair.
In a rare moment of pride, Rabbi Loew gave it a name.
He called it Adam, and he led it by the hand back to the ghetto.
“For weeks, the golem followed Rabbi Loew’s every instruction and those of his disciples.
It brought water from wells to the homes of widows and orphans, completed chores for the injured and elderly, and carried sleeping children carefully in its arms from the synagogue to their beds.
Each night it walked the boundaries of the ghetto, a silent defender against anyone who might mean the community harm.
It bore no weapons, made no threats. But anyone who drew too close with violent intent seemed to sense its power, the gift of creation that the rabbi had breathed into its body, that animated its limbs and put light in its eyes.
And they avoided that place as surely as if the golem had fought them after all. ”
Emmett pauses for a moment, faltering for the first time. Their hands, laced together in their lap, fidget almost absently, until Emmett seems to catch themself and goes still. They take a breath, set their shoulders, and go on.
“Finally, Rabbi Loew deemed the threat of the pogrom well and truly gone.
Against the protests of the children, who loved their calm, quiet protector, and the sick and the elderly, who had come to rely on its steady, helping hands, against even the words of his own disciples, who saw it as a source of power and study and insight into the secrets of Creation, Rabbi Loew took his Adam back to the Vltava, claiming that, without a purpose, without a threat to defend the city against, the golem would surely go mad.
Rabbi Loew was only, after all, a man—and true, lasting Creation was beyond his power.
“With the same wet earth with which he’d first crafted the golem’s body, he covered the Aleph on its skin, changing the word from Emet to Met—from truth to death.
The breath of creation left the creature’s lungs, and then the lungs crumbled away, and then the body, until the golem was nothing but earth and water once more.
Rabbi Loew gathered up two handfuls of clay, as a reminder of both his power and his responsibility, wrapped the clay in cloth, and brought it with him to his own home.
He stored it with his most private journals and wrote down, in notes only his disciples and their descendants would understand, everything he’d learned of the creation and command and stewardship of the golem. ”
Emmett’s voice is hoarse now, as if they’re not used to speaking for so long.
“On his deathbed, Rabbi Loew passed on both the journal and the clay to his favorite disciple,” they say, soft and rasping in the quiet dark around them.
“Not to be used, the rabbi said, unless in a moment of great danger, or great need. The disciple took his words to heart and never used either the clay or the journal in his lifetime. He passed them to his eldest son, who passed them to his own eldest son, and onward, down the generations. It’s said that the notes and the clay are still in the hands of the disciple’s family, waiting for the moment when they’ll be needed again. ”